Gut Health Explained

Although the term “microbiome” began showing up with increasing frequency in scientific and popular literature earlier this century, scientists still don’t have a widely accepted definition of a healthy gut. Discover your expert’s functional definition of gut health as it relates to gut disease, diversity, and digestion.

Explore the human digestive tract to learn how this landscape shapes the microbial community—including such an extensively folded small intestine that its absorptive capacity is 600 times more than it would be as a straight tube. Learn how we first acquire our personal set of microbes, and how dozens of factors create each person’s unique microbiome, as unique as fingerprints.

Like any other scientific field, the study of the microbiome begins and ends with the scientific method. But the scientific method is a slow process, and the microbiome contains trillions of organisms, thousands of species, and unknown numbers of subspecies. Learn how Koch’s postulates and the work of Dr. William Hanage at Harvard affect the study of the human microbiome.

Since following the scientific method of research can be a slow process and consumers want answers about the human microbiome right now, it’s easy for us to fall prey to pseudoscience. Discover how to recognize pseudoscience and its often popular terms that aren’t recognized by the scientific community, such as the ubiquitous “leaky gut.”

Though it’s common for influencers and the popular media to label microbes as “good” or “bad,” science doesn’t bear this out. Each of us has a unique gut environment, and a particular microbe could be beneficial for one person but a pathogen for someone else. Although the picture is not yet complete, explore several relationships that have been discovered between microbes and disease.

Learn about the innate and adaptive immune systems that work to maintain gut homeostasis and protect against pathogens. These two systems work in very different ways, but they accomplish the same, larger goal. You’ll also explore the significant relationship between the gut immune system and that of the body as a whole.

Our microbiome plays a crucial role in weight regulation and metabolism. Learn about relatively recent studies showing specific relationships between the microbiome and energy balance and weight in mice, especially with respect to fecal transplants. But before you run out to buy butyrate supplements, be aware that the effects haven’t translated to humans.

The gut-muscle axis is a fairly recent discovery in microbiome science. Learn how, through this pathway, the microbiome could influence muscle metabolism, age-related muscle loss, and even athletic performance. And while we’re a long way from turning the microbiome into a performance-enhancing intervention, we do know that fiber and physical activity are important both for you overall and your gut microbes.

Specific parts of the nervous system, the gut microbiota, and all the associated neurotransmitters and hormones combine to form the gut-brain axis. You might have heard the gut being called the “second brain,” and even the root cause of mood disorders. Explore the science behind the labeling of these two extremely complex systems. How much do we really know about the ways in which they interact?

Everyone has bouts of GI distress from time to time, and while they might not be dangerous, they can be uncomfortable. If you do go to the doctor and get a clean bill of health—or the diagnosis of a functional disease like IBS—but you still have symptoms, what can you do? Learn how food intolerances, medication side effects, and even your exercise habits could be affecting your GI comfort.

Your long-term dietary pattern plays a significant role in both the composition and function of your microbiome. Discover which foods and supplements are shown by valid scientific studies to be best for your gut health. Learn about the DASH eating plan, the Mediterranean dietary pattern, ketogenic diets, fermented foods, and the time-restricted feeding plan. While they’re popular, do they help or hinder?

In addition to diet, learn how exercise, sleep, and stress impact your gut health. Discover the relationship between exercise and the production of metabolites that help regulate immune activity. Learn about the relationships between inadequate sleep and/or nightshift work and microbiome species diversity and stress and functional gut disease such as IBS.